The launch date announcement comes as the LSE put the highly-publicised December outage of the system - which already runs on its Turquoise anonymous trading venue - down to “human error”. It declined to give more details.

The LSE, which had been forced to halt the imminent migration of the system to the main markets, initially said the major outage occurred in “suspicious circumstances”, apparently triggering a police investigation. But the Metropolitan Police, the e-crime unit and the City of London Police all told Computerworld UK that no such investigation was ongoing.

Today, as the LSE issued a plan for the migration, it informed traders that it had “been working closely with our clients to ensure that the existing market infrastructure can process the high volume of traffic clients expect due to the increased performance of Millennium Exchange”.

A new go-live date of 14 February had been set, it said, preceded by early access on 24 January, and full live dress rehearsal tests on 5 February and 12 February.

The new system runs a Linux-based matching engine, understood to be developed around Red Hat software. In November the exchange hired 81 additional open source staff to cope with the changes to the system, which operates in a C++ environment. It replaces a Microsoft .Net system, built by Accenture.

Average trading times on the new system are reported at a record-breaking 126 microsecond latency, though the technology already faces new challengers that are promising faster messaging.